Disclaimer: All rights to Godzilla and its characters, places and names belong to Toho Studios. All rights to Godzilla (2014) and its character, places and names belong to Legendary Entertainment. The author of this story owns nothing; this story was written for entertainment purposes only; not money or profit of any kind.
Foreword: I have been a fan of Godzilla since I was a small child. My earliest memories are of when I was three years old, watching the original Mothra vs Godzilla movie with my family on TV. Since then, Godzilla and its stories and movies have always held a very large place in my heart, and I finally feel confident enough to write a Godzilla story.
This is my view on a version of Godzilla (2014) where the character of Joe Brody survives. The characters death was the only black mark on an otherwise perfect film. To make this story work and to put a different spin on it, I've added more characters and shifted the focus more on MONARCH. Overall, the story will be the same, but with some added characters and scenes. I wanted to preserve the original story as much as possible without it being a simple word-for-word transcript, although much will be the same, such as the opening prologues that take place in 1999.
Regardless, I hope I do the characters and story justice.
Godzilla
Chapter 1
'They didn't understand what they were doing. I'm afraid that will be on the tombstone of the human race'
-Michael Crichton
*CLASSIFIED*
SENSITIVE MATERIAL-
APPROVED EYES ONLY-
MATERIAL RELEASED
UNDER
MONARCH
AUTHORIZATION
MONARCH FILE #54-014
ATOMIC STRIKE 11MD-4554
OPERATION: LUCKY DRAGON
Our operation in the Pacific has concluded and by our measure was a success. As you are well aware, over the past months we've lost several vessels in the Pacific region.
After confirming the Russians were not behind theses attacks, we began tracking the entity responsible. A previously unknown species photographed here. Sightings of this creature have been on the rise ever since our nuclear fleet discovered it's existence in the extreme ocean depths.
Unfortunately, our efforts to locate it proved unsuccessful. This is why under the advisement of the Joint Chiefs, a multi-national coalition was assembled to track down the organism.
Dubbed: Monarch Unit, this team of specialists scoured the Pacific region, establishing contact with the native islanders and gathering intelligence on a creature of mythical proportions.
A legend known as Gojira.
The Monarch team surmised that the atomic signature of our submarines stirred this Gojira from slumber. Utilizing this tactical information, we were able to set a trap for the creature, luring it with our nuclear weaponry.
Six days ago, the target was spotted on an intercept course with the Bikini Atoll; part of our Pacific proving grounds. And the sight of a top secret operation codenamed: Lucky Dragon.
Detonation protocol was quickly amended to a new zero hour. A string of antennas relayed televised signals, giving command a second-by-second account of what was happening at ground zero.
On March 1st, 1954, Operation: Lucky Dragon commenced.
The atomic device was deployed at Drop-Point: Alpha-341, and the creature swam straight into our trap. We have had no further sightings of the target following detonation. As the reentry team was not able to confirm eradication, the fleet will continue to monitor for any sign of activity.
In the meantime, it is our determination that the public be kept unaware of the creatures existence. We are working to ensure that this strike is officially acknowledged as atomic testing.
I would add that the Monarch program has been invaluable in locating and tracking this organism. And that it is our national interest to continue funding the initiative. We will keep you informed as the situation develops.
The Philippines
1999
A blue and white helicopter filled with scientists and engineers from a variety of backgrounds flew over the dense and mountainous green canopy of the jungle below. On the side of the chopper, in black letters, read 'Monarch', with its matching insignia above it.
A Japanese man in his early forties wearing a panama hat and sunglasses sat stoically as he looked down at an old pocket watch resting in his hand, a faint frown creasing his brow as his eyes narrowed in thought behind his sunglasses. The hands of the watch were forever frozen at 8:15 A.M.
His name was Dr. Ishiro Serizawa, and he was the leader of this expedition. Holding degrees in both Ecology and Elemental Biology from the Universities of Tokyo and Oxford, respectively, as well as possessing a deeply philosophical view of science and nature, Serizawa was among the most respected men in his field.
Seated next to him was Dr. Vivienne Graham, an attractive young woman from Bromely, England in her mid-twenties with dark brown hair and wearing a large sunhat. She watched Serizawa closely as he slowly ran his thumb across the watch in a manner that suggested his mind was far away, and yet looking ahead at the task that awaited them.
A naturally gifted paleozoologist, with expertise in behavioral science, biology and fossil analysis, Vivienne was recruited into Monarch by Serizawa after discovering her as a doctoral candidate in paleobiology while at a speaking engagement at Oxford two years prior in 1997. Since then, what began as a mentorship between the two doctors had evolved into a close partnership. Graham had come to see the doctor as not just a colleague, but something of a father figure, and was known to directly refer to him as 'Sensei'.
Serizwa, by comparison, was impressed by her talent and passion for her research, and he had come to value her insight as well as how she challenged him with her scientific focus. While working in the field, the pair were nearly inseparable. In fact, he had come to regard Graham as his intellectual equal.
It had become something of a joke among the other members of Monarch that Serizawa and Graham were seemingly attached by some invisible chain, because where one went, the other was usually close behind.
The pilot then spoke up, informing the crew that they would be approaching the landing zone soon. Looking out the windows, they saw their destination come into view as they rounded a tree-covered mountain.
A massive mining site owned and operated by a company called Universal Western Mining. Hundreds of workers looked like ants from above as the chopper flew over head. As the helicopter circled above the site heading for its landing zone, the team inside noted how torn up the valley looked. Progress always comes at a cost, and in this case, it was steep.
Upon landing, the group wasted no time in exiting the helicopter, their equipment in hand, quickly made their way over to a middle-aged American man in a tan suit, flanked by several men who were armed to the teeth with weapons. The Philippines were a dangerous place, in more ways than one.
"Dr Serizawa?" he asked, shouting over the sound of the rotors. Upon receiving a nod in confirmation from Serizawa, he shook the mans hand and introduced himself as Jerry Boyd.
"I'm just warning you, it's a mess. A total mess." He lead the group into the site through the barbed-wire chain link fence that acted as the entrance to the mining operation.
Serizawa nodded by way of acknowledgment and as they made their way through the site, Boyd continued to explain the situation.
"Monarch sent my team and I in this morning. Took a quick look around, but I told them we needed you." He led them to a series of catwalks that led to the main quarry.
"They picked up a pocket of radiation last month," Boyd said in reference to the mining company. "They got excited, thinking they had a uranium deposit. They started stacking up the heavy machinery, and then, well-"
Graham noticed his voice catch, realizing something terrible must have happened as they approached the edge of the balcony that overlooked the entire site. And her stomach dropped at what they saw.
"The- the valley floor collapsed into a cavern below," Boyd said, clearing his throat. "Just dropped away. Just... gone."
They leaned on the railing as they took in the sight. The quarry looked more like a bottomless pit, with the wreckage of large power loaders, dump trucks and support bridges strewn about the sides of the massive crack in the earth. The ominous mood grew more as Boyd continued.
"Best guess is about forty miners went down with it."
A short time later, the Monarch team had changed into full body hazmat suits to protect them from the radiation as they descended into the cavern deep below the surface. The massive cavern was long and wide, but it was extremely difficult to traverse.
The darkness was nearly absolute with almost no ambient light, and one could easily trip over the many sharp and jutting rocks. The team led by Boyd and Serizawa used high-powered flashlights to illuminate their way.
Further along in the cavern, Vivienne Graham could see the torches of the other Monarch team members, from both theirs and Boyd's, running wires and setting up flood lights to brighten the cavern.
"This way," Boyd said, his voice slightly muffled by the radio in his suit. His face was illuminated by the small lamp in the masked hood of his protective suit. He led them further along. Everyone was breathing hard after the long and arduous trek down into the earth.
"When they first discovered this pocket, the radiation levels were only half as strong," Boyd explained, holding out his Geiger counter; the device beeped and whined as it took in the surrounding radiation.
"It's almost as if contact with the outside air started catalyzing something."
Even in the dark of the cavern, everyone could see the outlines of the most striking feature of this pocket in the earth. Numerous structures of what appeared to be massive stalagmites jutted out of the ground.
However, unlike the normal variety of stalagmite, these objects were extremely smooth and curved inward towards the matching stalagmites on the other side of the cavern. Even to the untrained eye, it was clear that these were not made of rock.
Serizawa and Graham moved the light from their torches up the length of one of the colossal formations. They were huge; roughly the height of six grown men standing on top of one another.
"Some kind of fossils, right?" Boyd questioned aloud. "I've been digging holes for thirty years, never seen anything like it."
'Incredible,' Graham thought.
Her breathing came in ragged exhales filled with excitement and a primal sense of awe and fear; the kind that came when viewing the remains of something much larger than oneself. She had felt this same sensation the first time she had seen the towering skeleton of a Tyrannosaurus Rex when her class had taken a field trip Museum of Natural History in London at the age of six.
The corners of her mouth tugged upwards in a slight grin at the memory. She had sneaked away from her class to look at the dinosaur skeletons for herself, and was later discovered curled up asleep at the foot of a brontosaurs display.
If there was one thing Vivienne Graham had an keen eye for, it was fossils. So much so, she often joked that she could read bone striations like her grandmother could read tea leaves. And the gargantuan fossil in front of her was precisely the reason she joined Monarch.
The chance to be a part of life-changing discoveries and the promise to examine specimens and the fossils of creatures that the traditionally narrow-minded scientific consensus of the world so firmly insisted could never have existed outside of fantasy or myth.
Further in the cavern, several men announced in Filipino that the power was on, and the numerous floodlights filled the cavern with light. Illuminated in the eerie glow, the realization of where they stood shocked the Monarch scientists to their cores.
More of the massive fossils lined the entirety of the cavern.
"It's a rib cage," Dr Serizawa breathed. They were standing in the middle of the chest cavity of a colossal fossilized skeleton. Looking down, they could see parts of the creatures vertebrae jutting from the rocky ground. The creature had clearly died on it's back, and had been buried by time.
"Oh, my God," Graham breathed, her heart and mind racing with excitement and endless possibilities. However, one possibility overshadowed all others. "Is it possible? Is it- is it him?"
"No," Serizawa replied with a strong degree of certainty. "This is older. Much older."
More shouting in Filipino drew their attention away from the fossils, and they heard the voice of Boyd calling them from up ahead.
"Hey, guys! You gotta see this!"
Making their way further up the length of the rib cage, they found Boyd taking pictures of a massive bulge attached to one of the larger ribs. Serizawa's and Graham's Geiger counters began crackling and whining more loudly the closer they got to the strange protuberance.
The thing was the size of a large golf cart and had a oily black color. It had a distinctive curved and segmented appearance, with a number of indentations or dimples running up it's sides. At a glance, one might assume it was a cancerous tumor, but what was evident was that this was no sediment deposit or clump of rock.
"What is it?" Graham wondered. "Some kind of egg? A dormant spore?" She circled the huge rib, taking note of the difference in texture and color. "The bones are fossilized, but this- This formation seems to be perfectly preserved."
Serizawa shook his head, having no answer to give. He moved his flashlight up the unusual bulge, and noticed that there was a large string of the same material growing from the top of the formation. It spread across the distance all the way to the rib on the opposite side.
It was then that they realized that there was a matching spore on the other end of the rope-like substance.
"This one looks broken," Boyd noted. "It's like something came out of it."
The formation was indeed hollowed out, and had the distinct appearance of being burst open from the inside. Before more study could be undertaken, the sound of helicopter blades drew everyone's attention from what they were doing. There was no way they should be able to hear any sound from the surface this far below ground.
The group, led by Serizawa, followed the sound that grew louder the further in they went. Soon, another discovery lay before them. A second entrance into the cavern; or more accurately, an exit. The tell tale signs of something burrowing led them through a smaller tunnel and they shielded their eyes from the sudden burst of sunshine. Making their way out of the tunnel, their eyes adjusted to the bright light.
Outside, the blue and white helicopter was circling overhead, and a huge swath of destruction lay before them. Leading from the tunnel, something huge had cleaved a direct path from the cavern across the landscape out into the open ocean.
Trees had been ripped clean out of the ground and the earth itself looked like something large had dragged it's massive weight across it, like a huge plow being raked across a field in one continuous motion.
It was obvious that this level of destruction was not caused by human carelessness, deforestation or mining. It had been caused by whatever had hatched from the dormant spore in a desperate effort to be free.
Janjira, Japan
1999
A few days later...
The sun was just beginning to rise over the small city of Janjira. Located in the Kanto region, it sat nestled between Yokohama and Tokyo along the coast with Mt. Fuji looming in the distance. Janjira was a small, relatively new experimental city built on cutting edge technologies.
In a quiet suburb, a pleasant quiet rain was falling on the ground. In one of the lovely homes, a young boy named Ford Brody rose from his bed. Action figures lay strewn about his bedroom floor. Leaning down, he picked up a sign he had made for his father that read 'Happy Birthday!'.
In another room of the house, the phone rang.
"I'll get it," the boys father announced. "It's probably for me."
Quietly making his way down the hallway, Ford peeked around the corner into the home office. His father, Joe, was listening on the phone, a frown on his brow. This had not been part of his plan to surprise his father on his birthday.
"No Takashi, just listen to me for a second! I'm asking for the meeting because if I have to shut the reactor down, you're not gonna want to read about it in the memo... Because I've been following these tremors since they started in the Philippines, and now they're in our own back yard, that's why."
Ford was used to his dad taking phone calls from his job at the nuclear plant at home, but his dad sounded particularly stressed. Joe Brody was something of a workaholic, taking his job extremely seriously. But it was unusual for him to be up so early on his birthday.
"No, no, no, Hayato says I need to go through you about this. No, I don't- Look, I'm just- I'm just trying to follow the protocols that were set forth by the company, that's all. That's my job."
Ford looked up to see his mother, Sandra, quietly walking down the hall, adjusting the buttons on her sleeve. Noticing her son hiding by the door, she did the same on the opposite side of the doorway and glanced into the office to see her husband.
"He's already awake," Ford whispered.
"Oh, I know, he got up early," Sandra whispered back, feigning shock.
"What are we gonna do?"
Sandra sighed, and frowned in thought. "Get dressed, I'll figure it out."
A short while later, the family headed down the walk to start the day. The weather had not improved, and was still gray and wet. Ford ran past his dad and waved as he ran to the school bus across the street. "Later, dad!"
Joe halfheartedly waved to his son, as he was still distracted by his cell phone. Joe walked to his car and tugged on the car door which was still locked. "With all due respect, Takashi; and honor," Joe continued, his patience growing thin with his colleague on the other end. "Respect and honor, with all of that, I am an engineer and I don't like unexplained frequency patterning near a plant where I'm responsible."
Giving up on trying to open his car door, he turned around to Sandra and shrugged. Sandra smirked and unlocked the car door for her husband as he concluded his phone call. "I need a meeting; make it happen!"
He hung up his phone and sat behind the wheel and started the car as Sandra waved to their son through the windshield. Joe sighed as he put on his seat belt and Sandra reached over and clipped his I.D. card to his blazer, smirking. "He made you a sign."
"Hmm?"
"Your birthday sign," she explained, her voice laced with disappointment and sadness. "He worked so hard."
Joe's expression fell with regret at his wife's words, feeling like an ass for not paying any attention to his son. He had broken his one rule as a father: Work should never come before family.
"Oh, God," he sighed as he watched his son's school bus pull away.
"I'm going to come home early, take the car and pick him up, and then we can get a proper cake," Sandra said, already planning how to remedy the situation. She smiled at her husband fondly as he reached his arm around her shoulder. But she could see in his eyes he was already thinking back to the nuclear plant.
"Listen," Joe said. "I need to know that it's not the sensors. Okay? I can't be calling this meeting and look like the American maniac. So when we get there, just grab a team and go down to Level-5."
Sandra quirked her lip at the phrase. "You're not a maniac; I mean, you are, just not about this."
Joe shook his head. "There just must be something I'm not thinking of!"
Sandra rolled her eyes at her husband. "Happy birthday!" she grinned at him.
"Wha-?" Joe looked dumbfounded at his wife, realization suddenly dawning. "Is it to-?"
Sandra nodded and began laughing. Her husband was a brilliant nuclear physicist, but often had trouble seeing what was right in front of him. "It is!" She leaned over and pulled him into a kiss. Quite a number of kisses, actually.
"I should have birthdays more often!" Joe grinned as they pulled out of the driveway and drove out of the neighborhood.
The Janjira nuclear plant was waiting.
"What is this?"
Joe was looking at several print-outs of data as he and two engineers, a Japanese man named Yoshiro and a fellow American named Stan Walsh, quickly made their way through the power plant towards the reactor control room.
The paper read like a seismograph, which was used to measure the force and duration of earthquakes and other seismic events such as volcanic eruptions and explosions. But this didn't even resemble anything he had ever seen.
"Seismic anomaly," Yoshiro explained.
Joe flipped through the different pages, all showing the same anomaly.
Most seismograph readouts showed a sudden spike in activity, growing and falling before spiking again with each aftershock, lessening in intensity with each shock before eventually going back to normal. This was wholly different.
Yoshiro pointed to the graph. "This graph is minutes; X is minutes, not days. This is now!"
The readings showed a sudden spike in both P-waves and S-waves that continued on a constant frequency and magnitude for a long period of time, before promptly falling off. It was then repeating the same reading at regular intervals. But the intervals in between were becoming smaller and smaller, meaning whatever was causing this was either getting faster, or closer.
"Wait, hold on," Walsh said, wanting more clarification. "Seismic as in earthquakes? You're talking about earthquakes?"
"No, earthquakes are random; jagged," Joe explained. "This is consistent, and increasing. This is a pattern."
Several floors below, Sandra had assembled a team of engineers and they were quickly getting dressed in hazard equipment. "Alright, people, let's make this quick," she said, as she tightened her face mask. "In and out. We check the sensor equipment are working properly, and get back out."
Once the last of their gear was in place, one member opened the large reinforced door that led to the lower corridors near the reactor core.
"Takashi, what the hell is going on?" Joe asked as he entered the control room. He held up the papers in his hand. "Have you seen this?"
"Yeah," Takashi nodded, and followed Joe over to a computer monitor. "Maybe not such a good time for a meeting?"
Joe narrowed his eyes as he brought up a new reading, just like the ones from before. "Where's the epicenter?"
"We don't know," Takashi replied, concern in his voice. "But it keeps getting stronger." Joe frowned and looked up at his colleague.
"It's gotta be centered somewhere."
Looking across the room at an older Japanese man named Hayato, the man Joe had spoken to on the phone earlier, seated at a console.
Hayato sighed and shrugged as he turned in his chair. "No one else is reporting it," he replied. "We're contacting every other plant in the Kanto region. Tokai, Fujiyama; they're all unaffected. But my guess is these readings are just aftershocks from the Philippine earthquake."
Joe walked over to the display console that showed the display for the entire plant. "Are we at full function?"
"Yes, we are," Takashi confirmed. "But perhaps we should be drawing down, to be safe?"
A sudden, violent tremor rocked the building, frightening everyone in the room as the lights flickered before coming back on. The normally quiet control room was now bustling as every worker ran back and forth from console to console.
"Take us offline," Brody ordered.
"Now, Joe, we gotta talk about-" Walsh implored, but was interrupted by Joe lifting a hand to silence the man, having no patience to hear any more bureaucratic nonsense.
"Do it! Now. Wind it down."
The engineers in the room began scurrying shut the plant down and Joe quickly walked over to a rack of two-way radios to contact Sandra's team down below.
"Sandra? Sandra, are you there?"
Another tremor shook the control room, this time causing the lights to go out fully, nearly throwing Joe and several other people to the ground. Dust and ceiling tiles fell to the floor as the emergency lights came on.
The shaking of the walls and pipes of the corridor around the group caused them to freeze in their steps. They had nearly reached the reactor core when the tremor started.
"We're turning back!" Sandra ordered her team. "Let's go!"
Another tremor shuddered through the hallway followed by a loud metallic pop, Sandra's attention was drawn back towards the core. A massive wall of radioactive fog was moving down the corridor. Moving down through the chamber at horrifying speed, like a specter of death, the nebulous wall of death was on the move.
"Oh, God," Sandra breathed, every inch of her being filled with fear as she and her team ran as fast as they could.
"Joe? Joe can you hear me? There's been a breach! We're heading back to the Containment Seal!"
Joe's eyes bulged as he listened to his wife's voice over the radio. She was breathing heavily, indicating she was running. He picked up the two-way radio and held it close to his mouth, speaking as clearly as he could.
"Sandra, listen to me, you need to get out of there. If there's been a reactor breach you won't last five minutes; with or without the suits. Do you hear me?"
"I hear you, we're coming!"
Another tremor rocked the plant, even more violent than the last. This time, everyone was thrown to the floor, and the sound of rending metal and shattering glass sounding like an angry roar drowning out the emergency sirens. Choking dust and dirt filled the air like fog and the red emergency lights cast an eerie glow.
As the non-essential workers in the control room began to run out the door in a desperate evacuation, Joe grabbed Takashi and pulled him aside.
"I'll meet them down there myself," Joe said. "Put the doors on manual!"
Takashi looked shocked as Joe then ran towards the exit. "Joe, I cannot do that!"
"Keep the doors open," Joe ordered. "My wife is still in there!"
Sandra Brody had never felt her heart pounding this hard. They had been put through countless drills. Gone through hundreds of hours of training. But she had never been trained to run from a cloud of pure radiation. Glancing over her shoulder, she saw the death cloud rounding the corner behind them.
"Come on! Let's go!"
Joe ran as fast as he could through the facility towards his goal. He ran past scattering workers and the blaring sirens fell on deaf ears.
Sandra!
Sandra!
Sandra!
Her name hammered through his mind like the beat of a war drum, matching his pounding heartbeat. He rounded the corner into the Containment Seal. His heart stopped when he didn't see her or the team. He stood at the large rectangular doorway that led into the long corridor.
He saw no sign of anyone. The corridor was silent. Breathing raggedly, Joe pressed the intercom button on the panel next to the door.
"Takashi, tell me this door is on manual."
"Manual, yeah," Takashi confirmed. The Japanese man's voice was shaking even over the intercom. "But, Joe, we are starting to breach!"
"I'm right here," Joe responded firmly. "As soon as they're through, I'll seal it!"
Lifting the radio to his mouth, he tried to reach Sandra. "Sandra, honey, can you hear me? I'm at the door!"
The only response he received was static.
Sandra's team was still running as fast as they could down the winding corridor. Her chest felt like it was about to explode. She heard her husband's concerned voice in her ear. She could tell he was trying to sound calm, but he was stumbling over his words.
"Sandra, I- I'm waiting for you. I'm at the checkpoint, but you have to run, honey, as fast as you can!"
"I am!" Sandra yelled.
No sooner had the words left her mouth that several of the steam pipes that ran along the walls of the corridor burst open, blasting Sandra and one of companions, Kenji, off their feet. Sandra, filled with the energy of the adrenaline pulsing through her body, immediately sat up.
The other members of the team ran past them, following emergency protocol to not stop for any reason in the event of a core breach. Sandra looked and saw the looming death cloud racing towards them.
'Oh, God,' she thought.
"Joe, close the door, or the whole city will be exposed!"
Brody heard the panic in Takashi's voice over the intercom. He could feel hope beginning to slip away from his grasp as the realization began to set in that they were standing on the potential site for a new Chernobyl.
"Sandra!" he practically yelled over his radio. He stared down the seemingly endless corridor of concrete and metal piping for what felt like an eternity. His mind was mimicking the static he heard over the radio, silently compelling an answer to come through.
"Joe? Joe can you hear me? Are you there?" Sandra's voice finally responded, nearly causing his heart to leap into his throat.
"Yes!" he responded, cradling the radio in both hands as though it was his lifeline. "Sandra, Sandra can you hear me?"
He listened to her pant several times before she responded with yes.
"Joe, it's too late," she said. Her voice was filled with an odd mixture of exhaustion and sorrow. "We're not coming. We're not gonna make it in time."
"No, no, don't you say that," he implored. "Don't you say that! You run as hard as you can, honey!" Tears filed his eyes and his voice was breaking.
"Joe, you have to close the door. You have to live for our son!"
Another tremor rocked the building, but Brody barely felt registered it as he stared hopelessly down the tunnel. He barely registered Takashi practically screaming at him to close the containment door. His entire focus was on the monster that was rushing for him down the corridor.
The massive onrush of radioactive fog was roaring towards him like a nebulous embodiment of death, without conscience or mercy.
And Joe Brody stood as the lone sentinel that guarded the world from this monster, screaming as the cloud raced towards the doorway. He slammed his palm on the large button, slamming the massive metal door shut just in time as the cloud careened into the sealed door.
Turning away, he slumped against the door frame, clutching it for support as he became wracked with sobs, guilt and sorrow overtaking him. For a moment his crying was all he heard until a muffled pounding came from behind him.
He froze.
The door. It was coming from behind the door.
He slowly turned around to see Sandra's team through the glass porthole window on the door, pounding on the window begging to be let out.
"I'm sorry," he whispered, fresh tears rolling down his cheeks as he watched human beings, people he had worked with on a daily basis, begging for their lives.
He then let out a choked sob and covered his mouth with his hand as he saw Sandra push her way to the glass. He could see she was also crying beneath her protective mask.
She quickly removed her face mask, wanting her husband to see her face unobstructed, knowing the suits were useless now. She could already feel her body succumbing to the lethal levels of radiation. Two members of her team had already slumped to the floor.
The large outer bulkheads were beginning to seal, but Joe leaned in close to the window, not wanting this to be possible.
"Take care of Ford," she implored her husband over the radio.
The outer doors were inching closer to fully closing.
Joe could see her eyes were struggling to focus.
"Be a good fa- father."
Her voice was now a hushed whisper over the radio.
The bulkhead had nearly closed.
"I will," Joe whispered back.
"We didn't make it," was the last words he heard his wife say as the bulkhead doors shut with finality, like the door of a tomb closing. Joe pressed his forehead against the sealed containment doors and sobbed, his body racked with grief for a brief moment when another tremor rocked him back to reality.
The facility was beginning to collapse and he was standing at ground zero. So he did the only thing he could.
He ran for his life.
For her.
For his son.
Sitting in his school classroom, young Ford listened to his teacher reciting her lesson, using a television to demonstrate the life cycle of moths and butterflies.
Without warning, the television blinked out and the lights went dark, startling the class. The bell began ringing, and the teacher immediately told the children to stand up and began guiding them out of the classroom.
For a moment, Ford wondered if this was another emergency drill, but one glance out the window shattered that thought and his blood went cold.
Across the city, he could see that the nuclear plant where his parents worked was... falling apart. He heard the distant rumbling of the reactor towers crumbling, falling in a cloud of dust and debris.
Ford stood frozen in place, his mind blank and not hearing the frantic yelling of his teacher nor the frightened screaming of the other school children as they also saw the plant collapsing.
For young Ford Brody, the only thing he could think of as he watched what, to him, looked like the end of the world was, 'Where are my parents?'